Businesses are experiencing an ever-increasing trend to achieve higher utilization of computing resources. Companies that provide their own IT computing services are being driven to find ways to decrease costs by increasing utilization. Moreover, companies that provide these services are being driven to reduce overhead and become more competitive by increasing utilization of these resources. Numerous studies over the past decade have shown that typical utilization levels of computing resources within service delivery centers, raised floors, and data centers fall between 20% and 80%. This leaves a tremendous amount of white space with which to improve utilization and drive costs down.
Unfortunately, while sharing some common desired capabilities, many similar resources can have very different associated costs to implement, support and run. For example a pSeries UNIX server, whilst running exactly the same application code as an xSeries Windows server, may cost more to the supplier to run—therefore should cost more chips to bid and win the pSeries over the xSeries (pSeries and xSeries are trademarks of IBM Corp. in the United States an/or other countries; Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries; UNIX is a trademark of The Open Group in the United States and/or other countries).
Unfortunately, no existing approach provides a way to take such discrepancies into account when valuing a resource for sale/auction. As such, there exists a need for a solution that solves at least one of the above-referenced drawbacks of the related art.